HOUSE PROUD; When A Small Budget Thinks Big

By ELAINE LOUIE

Published: December 29, 2005

JIM HASKIN and Amy Husten fell in love fast, and within four months of meeting in late 1999, they were looking for a house together. They were both artists with busy professional lives in separate cities: She is a ceramicist and a project director for the department that looks into overseas ventures for the Guggenheim Museum; he paints portraits and is a partner at R&F Handmade Paints, a fine-art paint company in Kingston, N.Y. If their relationship was to work, they reasoned, they needed a home base.

But there was a problem: Ms. Husten liked stone farmhouses, and to Mr. Haskin, that meant small rooms and low ceilings, which held no appeal for him. ''I'm claustrophobic,'' he explained recently.

A year of frustrating house hunting later, they stumbled on a solution when Mr. Haskin mentioned that he was a fan of the California Case Study houses. The homes, built in and around Los Angeles after World War II by architects and designers like Eero Saarinen, Richard Neutra, and Charles and Ray Eames, were part of a program aimed at producing low-cost, experimental modern housing. Although they were antithetical in style to an old-fashioned farmhouse, Ms. Husten liked them, too. She and Mr. Haskin decided they could build an experimental, light-filled and relatively cheap house of their own in the Catskills, and over the past five years, on a budget of $500,000, they did.

The couple started with two acres of heavily wooded, hilly land in Stone Ridge -- once part of a cow pasture -- which they bought for $36,000 in 2000. Then they spent months poring over books on Case Study houses and interviewing architects, most of whom were too expensive. Finally, in late 2001, they met Erin Vali, a young architect -- he had just turned 30 -- who was about to open his own firm, Ulterior Mode in Brooklyn, and was willing to work cheap. He had never built a free-standing structure, but the couple felt an instant affinity for both his low-key personality and the apartment renovations in his portfolio.

''He would transform a boring space into an interesting home by inserting a floating staircase, a balcony overlooking the main floor, and he would maximize light and storage,'' Ms. Husten said. ''He leaves no space unused.''

The two-story house that resulted is 1,800 square feet, and the adjoining two-story art studio, with work spaces for both Mr. Haskin and Ms. Husten, is 900. It was a big change for both of them: Until last year, Ms. Husten, now 50, lived in a 500-square-foot studio on the Upper West Side; Mr. Haskin, now 44, had an equally small one-bedroom apartment in Kingston.

Mr. Vali pointed out that the cost of the house and the adjoining studios -- $185 per square foot including land -- is less than the cost of many prefabricated homes on the market. (Most prefabricated houses cost from $150 to $250 a square foot, excluding land, according to Allison Arieff, the editor of Dwell magazine and a co-author of the book ''Prefab.'')

The main challenge to keeping costs down, Mr. Vali said, was the exterior cladding. Most builders use two layers of materials to clad a house -- plywood and a weatherproof material like wood shingles or brick veneer -- which can be expensive. Mr. Vali had a hunch that a single layer of T-111, a Douglas fir plywood often used for sheds and barns, would protect much of the house and studio from the elements, and his contractor agreed. They had the red top halves of both buildings covered with the material, arranged in vertical slats in the style of a barn wall. Some of the bottom halves of the buildings have a plywood underlayer and a yellow top layer of cement board, a composite of cement and glass fiber that is typically used under tile in bathrooms and kitchens and is much cheaper than the usual outer layer of cladding. Mr. Vali had the material cut into two-by-four-foot boards and mounted them horizontally, so that they overlapped slightly, like shingles. He had used cement board before for interior walls, and knew that it would take paint, which would help protect it from moisture.

Inside, Ms. Husten and Mr. Haskin opted for a 14-foot ceiling and a simple open plan for the first floor of the house, in keeping with Mr. Haskin's taste for open spaces. Most of the floor is given over to a living-dining-kitchen area, which is furnished with dining chairs from Ikea and a dining table and a sectional sofa from Bo Concept in Manhattan, another store that sells low-priced Scandinavian furniture. The kitchen is free of status appliances: The couple entertain a lot -- friends and family -- and said they were happy with a General Electric refrigerator and a KitchenAid stove.

Compensating for the plainness of the interior, Mr. Vali and his clients chose a wild palette for the walls and the furnishings.

''Jim manufactures artists' paints, and he's attracted to bold color, as a painter,'' Ms. Husten said. ''We looked at a gazillion chips, and were looking for families of colors that would go together.''

The sofas are mostly purple. The kitchen is red, Ms. Husten's favorite color. The fireplace wall is an acid green, and the wall by the staircase is yellow. They used Mr. Vali's Photoshop program to try dozens of combinations for the exterior walls -- orange and pale orange, orange and turquoise, shocking pink and lavender -- before settling on colors inspired by the surrounding foliage: the yellow of autumn birch leaves for the cement board, the red of turning maple for the T-111.